1953
1952 1953 1954 Events * Republic of Egypt is proclaimed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. * House Concurrent Resolution 108 declares a sense of Congress that Federal supervision of Native American reservations should be terminated. * Ugetsu directed by Kenji Mizoguchi is released. Wins Venice Film Festival Prize. * Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber co-founds the Paris weekly L'Express. * Arthur Miller's play The Crucible opens on Broadway. * Arthur C. Clarke publishes Childhood's End. * China's population is 587.96 million. * Shipyard Scandal erupts in Japan. Timeline January * January: U.S. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon leaves Republican Party to protest its domination by conservatives. He continued to vote for a GOP majority leader to honor his election as a Republican. * January: Harold Bauer dies of MDA overdose in U.S. Army drug experiment. * January 3: Evelyn Lincoln begins working as John F. Kennedy's personal secretary. * January 5: Future CIA Director George Tenet is born. * January 7: U.S. President Harry Truman announces U.S. has the hydrogen bomb in his State of the Union address. * January 20: Dwight Eisenhower inaugurated as President of the United States. Richard Nixon becomes Vice President. * January 31: Future Russian Federation First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is born in Leningrad. February * February 19: Georgia approve s first U.S. literature censorship board. * February 26: Allen W. Dulles appointed the fifth Director of CIA. Probably doesn't hurt that his brother is Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. March * March 5: Joesph Stalin dies. * March 5: Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida dissolves parliament once again after receiving a vote of no-confidence. * March 13: Exiled Egyptian Queen Narriman leaves exiled Egyptian King Farouk to return to Egypt, where she files for divorce, citing his unfaithfulness as her reason. * March 14: Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Georgi Malenkov as Secretary of the CPSU. * March 26: Republican U.S. President Eisenhower offers increased military aid for the French colonial war in Vietnam. Anti-colonialism is for Democrats. * March 26: Chinese Communist Party Central Committee issues resolution encouraging the pooling of farm land to form agricultural collectives. April * April 3: Senate Minority Leader Democratic Senator from Texas Lyndon B. Johnson leads eight Congressional leaders in refusing the idea of a joint resolution for the U.S. air force to save the French forces besieged at Dien Bien Phu unless the military effort is part of a larger Allied effort. * April 19: Demand for a warrant to be issued for the arrest of Eisaku Sato Secretary-General of the Liberal Party in Japan, as part of the Shipyard Scandal, but Prime Minister Yoshida uses his authority to postpone arrest. * April 27: Jari Askins is born. May * May: U.S. and Ethiopia sign 25 lease agree for Kagnew Station * May: Aldous Huxley does mescaline for the first time. * May 8: French premier Rene Mayer devalues the Indochinese piaster from 17 to 10 francs. June * June 1: Workers at armaments plant in Pilzen, Czechoslavakia riot and sabotage works in response to radical salary reductions. * June 4: Atomic bomb test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, equivalent to 50,000 tons of TNT. * June 26: Two Buddhist orders in Cambodia declare a holy war against French Army. July * July 3: New French Socialist government of Joseph Laniel is sworn into office. * July 14: Paris police kill six and wound 44 peaceful demonstrators to stop a protest in favor of Algerian independence. * July 24: Claire McCaskill is born in Rolla, Missouri. * July 27: Ceasefire is signed, ending the Korean War. August * August: 30 year old Sunni elite Rashid Karami becomes Prime Minister of Lebanon. * August 16: Attempted coup by Iranian military officers against Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq fails. * August 19: In response to the nationalization of the oil industry by the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, the CIA launches Operation Ajax which reinstates Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne. * August 22: France closes Devil's Island penal colony. Other uses will be found for French Guyana. September * September 12: Senator John F. Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island. She is the daughter of John Vernon Bouvier III and Janet Lee Bouvier. * September 13: Nikita Khrushchev is elected First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. * September 22: Marie Ségolène Royal is born in Ouakam, Dakar, Senegal. October * October 14-15: Israeli armed forces kill more than 60 Palestinian residents in Qibya as a collective reprisal for an attack on the Israeli settlement of Yehud that killed three people. The residents of Qibya had no connection to the Yehud attack. * October 14: U.S. President Eisenhower promises to fire as communists any federal workers taking the 5th amendment. Jovial soldier proves himself a tower of jello in the face of McCarthism. Willingly sacrifices civil liberties. * October 15: Britain conducts second open-air nuclear weapons test (Totem Round 1), in Australia at the Woomera Rocket Range. * October 27: Britain conducts third open-air nuclear weapons test (Totem Round 2), in Australia at the Woomera Rocket Range. November * November: Army biochemist Frank Olsen commits suicide after being given LSD by the CIA. * 10th Special Forces Groups establishes its first overseas base in the Flint Kaserne at Bad Tölz in Bavaria. * November 9: Cambodia wins formal independence from France. December * December 5: Italian and Yugoslav troops withdrawn from disputed Trieste. * December 8: Pres. Eisenhower announces the Atoms for Peace program in a speech at the UN. Helps several countries start their own "peaceful" nuclear energy programs which provide the infrastructure for building nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan. Well done Ike! * December 23: Stalin's feared secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, is executed.